The word consists of two components: 'techno' and 'logy'. The second one (from the Greek 'logos', meaning 'the science of') is quite familiar from many other scientific disciplines, including etymology itself.
The first part 'techno' most of us tend to associate with the 'hard' technologies I just talked about. But the word word goes back to the Greek word [why do I start feeling like the hilarious father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding?] 'tekhne', meaning 'art, skill, craft, method, system' - a much broader concept that seems to refer to the various ways in which humans affect/alter/mould their natural surroundings. This hypothesis seems to be corroborated by Harper's Online Etymological Dictionary which traces the origins of 'techno' back to its (hypothesized) Proto-Indo-European base *tek-, meaning to 'shape, make'.
This matches nicely with the etymological roots of the word 'military', which are also quite revealing and somewhat surprising. To many of us, the word 'military' is strongly associated with our 'industrialized' concept of 'armed force'. When we say 'the military' as a noun, we clearly refer to the group of people who belong to the defence organization. But when we use 'military' as an adjective in combinations such as 'military industry' or 'military technology', we do not typically think of the people anymore. In those instances, the word military becomes almost inanimate. Yet the roots of the word military clearly only refer to the people. As we read in Harper's:
So the fundamental meanings of both the words 'technology' and 'military' are much broader and much more people-centric than most of us currently recognize. And when we think of 'military technology' mostly in terms of hardware, we may be unnecessarily constraining ourselves. And it's not even so much that this isn't 'right', it's just not smart.
NATO (as its member states) has throughout its history put a lot of emphasis on research and technology. The current focal point for these efforts is the NATO Research and Technology Organisation within which defense researchers from various academic disciplines and from throughout the Alliance come together to find 'technological' solutions to various defense problems. One of the most interesting RTO study groups I participated in was called 'Joint Operations 2030', a 'Long Term Scientific Study' that tried to identify new capability solutions that the Alliance might be able to use in future operations. As is often the case with such studies, we essentially abused the 'long-term' to be able to have a more out-of-the-box (and balanced) discussion about the short-term. I will write more about this in a future blog entry. But the point I want to raise here is that many of the 'technology focus areas' we identified were NOT 'hard' technologies, were NOT in the 'hard' sciences but rather in the social sciences. And yet our defense research organizations are still filled overwhelmingly dominated by engineers and operations research people with little exposure to academic insights from the social sciences (like anthropologists, economists, sociologists, even political scientists). As throughout this blog, my argument is NOT that we only need the latter. Not even that we mostly need the latter. But it IS that we have to find a better balance between the 'hard' and the 'soft'.
[I often use the two types of technologies that are described by the evolutionary economist Richard Nelson of Columbia University in his Technology, institutions, and economic growth. His main focus is economic growth, but his insights can be applied to many other spheres - including defense. The first one he labels physical technologies, which is what most of us typically think of when we think of military technology: things such as tanks, or radars, or communications. Social technologies, on the other hand, are ways of organizing people to do things. Examples in the defence realm would include doctrine, the laws of war, echelons, etc. Eric Beinhocker, in his monumental ‘The Origin of Wealth’ (I assign chapter 15 of this book 'Strategy: Racing the Red Queen' required reading at all courses I teach at military academies), gives the following example: “During the Industrial Revolution, for example, Richard Arkwright’s invention of the spinning frame (a Physical Technology) in the eighteenth century made it economical to organize cloth-making in large factories (a Social Technology), which in turn helped spur numerous innovations in the application of water power, steam, and electricity to manufacturing (back to Physical Technologies). The stories of the agricultural, industrial, and information revolutions are all largely stories of the reciprocal dance between Physical and Social Technologies.”
The real-life defence problems that we encounter today and that we are likely to encounter tomorrow require the same rigorously yet creatively focused research effort in developing social defense technologies that we have made for the past few decades in search of physical defense technologies.
Technology must needed thing for military base. Because we can't even think a day without technology. Technology gives fullness to all kind of military bases.
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